Bars in Verdun ...how the media got it wrong

   It was widely-reported this week that Verdun overturned a 47-year-old bar ban. That news had me scratching my head as Verdun has always been dry.
  I suspect researchers got that date from Wikipedia's Verdun page which has a link to a City of Montreal page stating that Verdun banned bars in a bylaw passed November 24, 1965.
    But in fact, quite the opposite happened that day. Verdun held a vote in which a majority of 319 voters favoured allowing liquor sales in restaurants, much to the consternation of Mayor George O'Reilly, who wanted a continued ban. The vote went 4,739 in favour of he wets and 4,720 for the drys. It was thought that it would be good for the development of the motel industry in Nuns Island but apparently nothing really happened in spite of the referendum.
    So how long has Verdun actually been dry? Approximately forever but in actual fact since 1919.
    There might have been sporadic tolerances for booze sales at certain social events, such as at the Legion, but even they were busted occasionally. And at one much-vilified party in 1958 91 teens were fined $35 for drinking.
   Mayor George O'Reilly said that the ban stems from the brief and sporadic Montreal postwar prohibition. Verdun participated in a local referendum on the subject and went dry and the mayor felt those rules still applied.
  Specifically he was referring to a vote on Jan. 30, 1919, in that referendum 2,168 people voted and made Verdun dry at a rate of about two-to-one.
 (Here's an excellent, enthusiastic overview from the New York Times about Montreal's various approaches to liquor control after WWI.)
  This article from 1964 claims that cancelling prohibition in Verdun would cost $1-million a year to the city.  And here's an article describing Verdun as a "dry city"... from 1913.
  So Verdun was pretty much always without real bars.
   That was a selling point for its development as it lured residents from the Point whose wives wanted their husbands to stay out of the bars, thus moving them one neighbourhood to the west. There were, as a result, lots of bars just outside of Verdun's borders, such as over the aqueduct in Cote St. Paul and along Wellington.
    Whether it's a good idea to put them there now is another question. It's a pretty normal thing to do and there are a lot of good people down there but there are also a lot of mental cases with major drug problems, sad to say.